Heroes of the Storm Stimpacks + Maintenance times

As Blizzard prepare for Heroes of the Storm to enter closed beta on January 13th they continue to add new features to the game.

In todays patch Heroes of the Storm received a new real money purchasable item called Stimpacks.

Stimpacks increase the amount of experience earned per match by 100% and gold earned per match by 150%. If you currently have an active Stimpack, purchasing or receiving an additional Stimpack will extend your current Stimpack duration.

Key points for Stimpacks:

Stimpacks start to deplete at the time of purchase and will not pause if you are logged out of the game, or if you are logged in but not actively playing. Maintenance does not extend the duration of a Stimpack.

A Stimpacks XP bonus will only affect your out-of-game Hero and Player Level Progression, and has no effect on actual gameplay during a Heroes match.

Stimpack benefits are additive. This means the bonuses they provide are added to the base amount of XP or Gold you receive by playing a game of Heroes.

For example: Imagine you have an active Stimpack, and earned 100,000 XP and 30 Gold for winning your latest Heroes match. In this case, the Stimpack will award you with an additional 100,000 XP and 45 Gold, totaling 200,000 XP and 75 Gold for that game.

Stimpacks will not provide benefits to any Quest rewards or other XP bonuses (such as Play with Friend, Double XP Weekend, and etc.)

Another example: Let’s say that you partied with a friend for the 50% Play with Friend XP bonus, and also completed a Daily Quest for 200 Gold during the winning game mentioned above. In this case, you’d earn a total of 250,000 XP and 275 Gold for that match.

Current costs for Stimpacks are: $4.39 AUD for 7 days$10.99 AUD for 30 days

*Please remember this is still Alpha, these can change in ways they perform, costs or could be completely removed.

Along with the addition of Stimpacks Blizzard have confirmed ‘normal’ scheduled maintenance times for Heroes of the Storm will be weekly on Tuesdays. The current times for the ANZ region will be:

*Again these can change depending on DLS, if longer maintenance is required for a patch and some weeks no maintenance is required. This is simply the ‘normal’ times so that people know what times Heroes will be unavailable when purchasing a Stimpack as your Stimpack still counts down during maintenance.

Personally I find the addition of Stimpacks a great thing for Heroes as they do not affect gameplay in anyway and are a perfect way to level a bunch of heroes up quicker while gaining a bit of extra gold. However I would have prefered if they were based off number of games played and not a timer.